Photo: Focus Features If I told you Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho was a soundtrack movie, would you understand what I meant? It’s not just a movie with a lot of music cues or with a great soundtrack. A soundtrack movie is a movie that feels like a 90-minute mixtape, the cinematic equivalent of someone putting a pair of headphones on your head and saying, “You gotta listen to this.” Garden State, which features literally that exact scene, is the crowning example of a soundtrack movie.
So, yes, Last Night in Soho, which had its North American premiere at TIFF on Friday, is Wright’s soundtrack movie, even more so than Baby Driver, which had its main character shout out the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion in the opening scene. It follows Eloise Turner , a naïve fashion student in London who is obsessed with the Swinging ’60s.
Without spoiling too much, Eloise thinks she’s in “Waterloo Sunset” London but finds she’s actually in a meaner, grittier London: the London of the Profumo affair, of the Krays, of Alfie . But the good news is both Londons had amazing music, and the movie gives us a feast of mid-’60s pop.
Aside from its music, the film is a feat of casting —and not only in its pairing of McKenzie and Taylor-Joy, the industry’s favorite young actresses of the moment. As part of his homage to ’60s British cinema, Wright fills out the ensemble with stars of yesteryear. Rita Tushingham, who broke out as a teen star in A Taste of Honey, is Eloise’s grandma; hunky Terence Malik is a punter with a secret; the late, great Diana Rigg is the landlady, who gets the film’s best line.
It’s this sort of thing that, throughout Last Night in Soho, made me keep thinking of another movie: Fred Schipisi’s Last Orders. That film, which premiered at TIFF exactly 20 years ago, got a lot of poignancy out of casting young guns from ’60s classics — Michael Caine, David Hemmings, Tom Courtenay — as old men grappling with aging and loss. The two films don’t have all that much in common, since one is a middlebrow literary adaptation and the other pulpy psychological horror.
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